Getting started with content marketing is a challenge in itself. While you know exactly what your business would like to say, you have a tough time understanding what your ideal customers are looking for, what they would convert on and what kind of goal based on their behaviour, should you set up for the campaign.

As marketers ourselves, we know how setting a goal for every content piece is probably one of the hardest decisions we make in a day. It’s like wanting a sale, but not really targeting at a direct sale and keeping our fingers crossed for a conversion to happen.

This is where setting up S.M.A.R.T marketing goals before getting started comes in play.

Understanding S.M.A.R.T marketing goals

S.M.A.R.T is a mnemonic acronym used in the digital industry to create a guide that helps marketers set specific objectives for their campaigns. It takes into account every aspect of the marketing strategy from ideation, market needs, goals and measurables that truly define the campaign’s success.

Here’s understanding each element of this tactic:

S – Specific

Gone are the times when you associate content marketing with a tactic to only boost your brand awareness, grow your digital audience or get more exposure. These goals were always vague and not measurable. Marketers never really understood what their business would gain out of them and ended up investing efforts in the wrong direction.

So get specific about what you want from each segment of your content marketing strategy. Associate each move with one goal that adds to the end target of your business. For instance, here are some of the targets we commonly associate with our content pieces:

• Increase blog traffic by X%
• Grow email list by X%
• Increase content upgrade downloads or lead generation by X%

The more specific you get about what you want, the better you’re able to strategize for it. Each goal needs different efforts and you don’t want to overwhelm a visitor by trying to achieve them all at once, and driving them in different directions.

M – Measurable

Continuing on the point above, don’t hide behind goals like brand awareness and social influence to avoid measuring your marketing efforts. Make sure that you are tracking your goals right from the start to the end – every little aspect of it.

In marketing too, you need to know exactly how far you have come through in the target market. This will help you understand what needs to change in a campaign to get better results, what hasn’t been working for your business and how far you are from reaching your end goal.

For example, substitute the ‘x’ above with defined numbers:

• Increase blog traffic by 10,000 monthly visits
• Grow email list by 30%
• Reach 5,000 content upgrade downloads

Putting yourself on set numbers makes measuring the content marketing efforts much more efficient. You know exactly what to look for and where you are possibly lagging behind.

A – Actionable

Each goal that you set for yourself, needs to be tied to the execution of a few tasks. So you need to make sure that you have a to-do list for every goal you set for the content marketing strategy segment. Be it ideation, creation or following up, ensure that you leave no stone unturned when it comes to making your content work for you.

Address the what, why and how behind each goal that you’re setting – what is the goal you’re targeting at, how does it add up to your business goal and how are you going to achieve it.

For instance, if your strategy includes creating ebooks on a popular industry topics, you need to define how many you can publish in a month, what goal are you achieving out of it – lead generation or social shares, and how are you going to promote the ebook to achieve the set goal.

This is where you need to make sure you’re taking into account the marketing resources available to you. If you’re going to advertise to promote a content piece to your target audience on a social channel, set a budget and define the period you’re going to run the campaign for.

R – Realistic

Yes, you’re going to have people breathing under your neck to increase the blog traffic to 1 lakh view in a month. But let’s understand one thing unless you have a huge marketing budget to promote your content pieces, this goal is absolutely unrealistic.

Content marketing is about building your audience on the right channel gradually by sharing informative industry pieces. The idea is to first make them aware of what’s available to them, why they need it and then move them towards how you could help – it is an entire process, that needs to run completely.

So be absolutely realistic about the goals you are aiming at with content marketing. For this, take a look at what your business has been doing so far, what the results look like from the previous year, gauge an average that your business has been able to achieve consistently and then look at what you plan on doing this year.

While it might look like too much math for content marketing, it is an important step. Make sure you sit your team down, discuss the performance of all the marketing efforts so far and accordingly create a realistic goal with the new additions to the strategy.

You don’t really want to end up claiming to achieve a bigger goal and then being rogered for not getting results.

T – Timely

So you know the goals you want to achieve, how they add up to your business’s end goals and how you’re going to be measuring them. Now comes the time to decide when you will be measuring all your efforts and for what duration you will be running all the campaigns.

Set defined deadlines for each of your goals so you know when to look back and measure your effort’s effectiveness.

Since content marketing takes some time to show results, we highly recommend you have monthly, quarterly or annual goals set for your business. You should know when to stop pumping in more effort or resources in executing one thing and optimizing it for better results.

Here’s how we would set the above goals for timely optimization:

• Increase blog traffic by 10,000 monthly visits in the first quarter
• Grow email list by 30% in 6 months
• Reach 5,000 content upgrade downloads in 2 weeks

Although here to we would like to remind you that setting a realistic goal is the smartest move your marketer can make.

Conclusion

Like every other marketing and growth effort that your business makes, it is important that you measure the effectiveness of your inbound strategy as well. The more you are able to define what you want to achieve from it, the better you will be able to target it at the right audience and get results that help your business reach its end goal.

Wondering where to get started?

Well, we got you covered!

Ah, the never-ending question that we hear from our customers. “Reps are lazynot motivated”, “reps are unproductive”, “reps are not efficient enough”. Sounds familiar?
But in the end, what does it even mean to be productive. When we ask them for this definition it just gets confusing.

Let’s clarify first, what is sales reps productivity?

It’s a metric, each to its own too. To some, it’s calls per hour, closure per interaction, power conversations and overall greater sales velocity.

In one sentence – it’s about having effective conversations with prospective customers. Ideally, your ideal customers with actual needs rather than the ones who are only window shopping.

I’m certain you understand it is more than just calling non-stop. For all you know, they could be calling some hotline.

Don’t get mistaken, though. Sales is still a numbers game. The way sales funnel is, the more you put into, the more you get out of it. But the ratio of that depends on sales manager’s effort too. How well prospecting plan is developed, what strategic approach manager took?

But, less yapping more answering questions, right?

Let me clarify first – not all reps are designed for fanatical prospecting (thanks to Jeb Blount for the term).

You may implement this 5 step plan right away, but it still starts with hiring the right talent. And among all the traits and experiences coachability is the most important trait you’re looking for.

Another fact – prospecting changed in 2016. It’s been changing for some time now, but cold-calling is less and less effective nowadays. Thanks to the internet, the buyer is more than ever in control and regular sales pitch just doesn’t work as well as it used to. You have to understand when the buyer is ready to engage and when it’s just way too early. Hubspot has this defined as a Buyer’s Journey. If you approach a buyer at the awareness stage and offer him to buy something from you – 99.9% he will say no.

So, how do you make reps prospect more nowadays?

First, set well-defined Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Defining your ICP should be the first thing you do as a sales manager. It’s so important that you shouldn’t move a single step without knowing who you’re after.

To setup a proper ICP you have to answer these questions:

• What industry you’re after?
• Geo-specific or not?
• What company size?
• Who in the company?
• Any other demographics?
• What challenges they face?
• Even consider the way they talk.

This should put you in their shoes and help to understand why they want to buy something from you. And the way that something should be sold.

So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and set up that ICP matrix, I’ll wait.

Got it? OK!

Now your sales reps know who they’re looking for. This is the most essential part of any prospecting strategy. Now your reps will know the right person when all those parts check out. It’s very similar to BINGO. You just check aimlessly if you got the right combination and once the final part clicks in – BINGO! You got a perfect potential customer.

Your reps now know who to look for, but the question remains HOW they do it? How do they find that perfect customer?

Simply using the right tools for the job.

They can’t just guess a name, phone number or an email address, right?

A sales rep is just as effective as the tools he’s using.

So, set the right toolkit on your own first and test it. Find some prospects yourself to understand the functionality and issues your reps might be facing when using this or that tool. You have to get your hands dirty first.

I suggest 3 categories of tools to equip your rep:

• Basic templates to prep them (Buyer’s Matrix, Prospecting Questionnaire, Qualification Matrix etc.)
• Data Sources to dig you ICP (LinkedIn Premium, data.com, DiscoverOrg, RainKing)
• Sales Acceleration Tools to get them cracking (Hubsell.co, Growbots, PersistIQ)

Each of those will make your reps life that much easier. But they still need goals, no?

Yes!

Setting right expectation is the key.

Tell reps what do you expect from them on a successful day. Setting up a first appointment? Maybe nurturing prospect for the demo?

If you’re a new sales manager, I imagine it’s difficult to set these expectations. Especially if goals change weekly. But start breaking it down:

• Amount of new connections daily / weekly
• Amount of leads in different stages
• Amount of calls or power connects
• Time spent on prospecting vs time spent on follow-ups?
• Define which leads are high relevance

Setting expectations to the healthy pipeline flow is a difficult activity if you can’t run. Aaron Ross explains more in this video.

However, I would also suggest going 1 step further.

Schedule a calendar for your reps.

I know. At this point it becomes almost as if you’re babysitting. And that is exactly what you might have to do, though initially!

When you put it on the calendar – it gets done. I’ve been putting stuff on my calendar even if it’s a regular activity – otherwise, I would decide to “do it later” and later soon becomes never. So, block your calendar if you want to stay productive.

And from my own experience, I can tell you. If you decide to setup “Prospecting Time” it will not work. It has to be specific. The more specific you are, — the better. Just be clear about the time it takes. Don’t setup 1-hour activity for half a day and vice versa. That’s why you, as a sales manager, have to try everything yourself first and understand the length each task takes.

Not sure what else to put on the calendar? Well, I loved what Juliana Crispo shared on her Youtube: How to structure your day! Video Here. Be sure to tell her, I sent you!

Ok, we’re nearing the end. What’s the final step?

To Celebrate!!

You might think I totally lost my mind by this point. But hear me out.

Prospecting isn’t the most exciting activity on the planet. Some might argue?

It’s your job to make it fun. Think of ways to celebrate small victories – reps have to remain motivated. It’s usually the toughest part to do as the motivation varies from individual to individual.

And money is less and less effective as a source of motivation. Think creatively for god sakes, what about some competition? The latest gadget? A day off? A new tool to allow them to prospect faster? Symbolic trophy? Even a prank to a loser could work, just not too harsh on this one. But what I want to say, is that it’s your way to think of fun ways to motivate your reps. Not just by giving them a check.

On the final chord.

Well, that is how you make your reps prospect more. Hope it gave you some insights and will help you to set up an effective prospective culture. And even if the buyer’s are more in control than ever, you’re still responsible to adapt your sales reps behaviour to make them more effective. Got anything to add, share or tell me that I’m wrong? Use the comment section below!

Also, I’d like to give you something special for reading all of this:

I’ve been browsing the web lately trying to find the best list of 10 people who you should follow if you want to get latest news, tips, help and see what they’re talking about. People who made the list not only talk about sales, but marketing as well. So go ahead and follow them if you want tweets from the engaging sales thought leaders!

1. Mark Hunter

Mark Hunter is a sales trainer and speaker. Started in 1998 as a consultant, he racked up clients like Coca-Cola, Kawasaki, Mercedes Benz and others. He also wrote several books to spread sales knowledge. He is very active on Twitter and his tweets speak value if you’re into sales.

2. Grant Cardone

Best Selling author of 7 sales books. His twitter is more personal, but still a great source for sales wisdom. Grant is an excellent guy if you want to grow 10x in a year. He also shares a lot of quotes to keep your motivation up when sales numbers drop.

3. Ian Moyse

Ian is a must to follow if you’re into cloud software. He is specialised in leading sales teams and is titled as a Sales Director of the Year 2015 by UK’s Institute of Sales & Marketing. One of his leading methods is making an example of himself for other sales reps and he does it masterfully.

4. Jeff Shore

Jeff is all about staying bold. His methodology is making a statement of your selling and doing it right! His credo is Sell Bold; Live Bold! Over 3 decades he gathered enough experience to not only teach about sales, but alter your mindset to make a better salesperson.

5. Deb Calvert

Deb focuses on putting people first and does it well. She coaches not only sales leaders, but executives too. What’s more interesting about her is that she puts more predictable approach to get results sooner. She developed a series of questions to figure out who is the best to hire and is a certified practitioner of MBTI testing.

6. Jeb Blount

The expert for sales acceleration. Jeb is a master in coaching sales leadership and people skills. His twitter speaks for itself and you can follow his blog too if you want learn more.

7. Tim Hughes

He is a social selling pioneer. However, he stopped blogging, but he is still active on social media. If you want to still hear his thoughts – follow him on twitter!

8. Barbara Giamanco

Barbara is a speaker, consultant and sales guru. She trained more than 30,000 sellers and her experience is a gem you just found. In matter fact, she managed to close a $500K deal in 30 days after 3 years stagnation. I think, that’s all I need to say about her.

9. Don Cooper

Don gives a new perspective to sales trainings. He customizes them to fit every company’s problems. He is specialized in manufacturing, service, retail, franchises and many other fields that I’m certain at least one of them will fit your needs.

10. Sales Hacker

I think this one is a leading B2B knowledge repository. They are the must follow experts if you’re selling B2B. They also run a blog and a content repository if tweets aren’t your thing. Anyone who wants latest B2B tips and tricks should follow them!

And that is it folks! Top 10 sales leaders, I think you should follow on twitter. If you have more suggestions – feel free to add them in the comments below or mention on twitter @saleschakra

Thank you for listening and have a good night.

Whether you are a seasoned sales person stepping into the role of a sales manager or a tech-founder who is ‘forced’ into this role, your best chances of success managing a team will depend on how strong are the systems you create around measuring sales progress, training and coaching your team, setting checkpoints for introspection. One of the biggest advantages in 2016 is the availability of tools that help you manage all these facets of sales management.

A foolproof sales management system comprises of 3 elements: sales coaching & training, systems for running effective sales meetings internally and using tools to measure effectiveness of all this.

Why is this article important to you? Here I’ll discuss the single most important formula that will define the likelihood of you meeting your sales goal in next 12 months. Whether you are a sales manager or a tech-founder who is forced into sales management role, the only way to assure you meet your revenue goals as a team is to get your sales reps behaviour aligned in the right direction. In short, winning sales rep behaviour – unproductive behaviour = likelihood of sales success

BJ Fogg from Stanford University created a simple model to breakdown the behaviour of people. His work explains that in-order for a specific behaviour to occur there must be the presence of motivation, an ability and a trigger to nudge that activity.

So, Behaviour = Motivation + Ability + Trigger.

If you are trying to get your team aligned to specific sales goals for the year, align their behaviours to success. And in terms of sales management, there are three key rituals that enforce these elements  – Sales Coaching (Motivation), Sales Trainings (Ability) and Sales Meetings (Triggers).

Let us discuss each of these elements in detail here and understand:

• What happens when these are not part of the sales management mix?
• What are tell-tale signs that any of these ingredients is missing?
• How can the presence of each of these 3 elements help you manage a tight ship?

Lead with Sales Coaching & Training plan

As a sales manager, your sales-rep coaching plan is the best bet to detect patterns in sales reps that are obstructing the path of their sales excellence. And training plan is the best way to act on it, with a precision.

On an average, losing a single sales rep within initial ramp-up period is about $0.5 Million loss in opportunity, productivity and replacement expenses. Additionally, onboarding a new rep takes 4-6 months to restore the rep to the full productivity.

To avoid that, pursuing a well-thought out hiring plan is supercritical as we covered in our podcast on how to hire sales rep with 100% confidence (and not on gut feel). However, the next best bet to avoid that is to create an intimate coaching plan that is centred around a sales rep (and not you).

Sales coaching uncovers true motivation level of the sales rep.

Signs that coaching & training is the missing link:

• Your team has consistent performers at both end of spectrum – top and bottom yielders.
• Poor performers have not shown incremental increase in their ability to sell in last 2 quarters.
• Each of the team members’ skillset is extraordinarily varied.
• You do not have a list of top 2 skill-areas each rep is committed to work towards each quarter.
• Your team gets together once in a quarter to share lessons learnt from real deals.
• Reps are hesitant to approach fellow sales colleagues for help (and there is underlying emotion of distrust and lack of sharing)
• Performance Evaluation is the main event for channeling a rep-driven feedback, organised semi-annually or annually. Great importance is placed on this event, lot of anxiety is observed both on part of reps and you, as the manager.

A solid sales management system integrates weekly 1-on-1 coaching (if not, monthly) as well as peer-led training programs. The key to success around both of these is to have a cadence, pig-headed determination to stick to the weekly plan as well as a method to measure the ‘before’ and ‘after’ status.

Coaching format can be as simple as a GROW model that we talked a bit about in this post. If you have not heard about it, download a simple template that you should take to coaching sessions. Set every one a designated day, typically 30 mins per rep for 1-on-1 coaching. (I prefer Tuesday Mornings as reps will have the time to sort out their stuff on Monday, in case you run month-on-month forecast cycles). And as your coaching session gives your insights on strengths and deficiencies of your sales reps, preparing a training plan that addresses skill-sets through to be most effective in delivering sales success.

And in case you are struggling with the training options, we’ve got you covered with 52 ideas that will keep your entire 1 year calendar filled.

Contrary to what sales reps really want, sales managers have a natural tendency to prioritize fire-fighting & getting intimate with their rep’s state of affair, (a.k.a let me show you how to sell?). And as a result, most sales meetings end up becoming a ‘general’ discussion on the state of sales that includes a bit of the pipeline discussion, a gut-feel based forecast discussion and an open-ended discussion on sales challenges, without any plan of action.

It does not matter if it is Monday morning stand-up sales sprints or mid-week remote sales conference-calls, any sales meeting that deviates away from a specific purpose and is not strictly regimented within a framework defined by the manager will soon become pointless and repetitive.

Here are some signs that your sales meetings are not serving you well:

• You end up asking for similar updates from sales reps throughout the week.
• Sales reps tell stories more than facts about their deals
• You find surprises in pipeline status after the meetings.
• Your confidence of your team’s pipeline is only skin deep. 60% at the best, somewhat better than a toss of the coin, right?
• And your forecast accuracy is even worse, like unexpected massive surprises in the last days of quarter.
• You have a vast variation in demonstrable skillsets of sales reps, with a solid bell-curve in the middle.
• You trust your gut / instincts more than the Salesforce reports & dashboards on the pipeline & forecast.
• Finding it hard to drive top of the funnel opportunities by sales reps.
• You find disparate skillsets in top performers and they are not able to share them effectively with other team members.

Why should you create a systemized and effective process of internal sales meetings?

• It is not about how you sell, or how sharp are your tools in your toolkit.
• Especially if you’re a company that’s competing in a multiplayer market with a high energy selling environment, the difference is set when it’s about the process with which you can improve and scale how you sell.
• Sales reps leave the company more than 70% of the time, not because they get better offer or are not happy with the product, that’s because of the sales manager. They are expecting structure, coaching, feedback, engagement and leadership from the manager. And organising your sales meetings around these needs of sales reps is exceptionally critical.
• The performance of your reps ultimately depends on the manager’s ability to align and coach the team on the behaviors necessary for growth. In this context, poor management engenders poor performance.

So, how do you go about setting a system of results-driven / outcome-based sales meetings?

First, acknowledge that as a sales manager you have a multitude of things to focus on the sales effectiveness. These include a healthy proportion of the top of the funnel pipeline, an accurate forecast, a good velocity of your deals, a great execution by your reps and keeping your team’s motivation high as well as binding the team together.

Each of these responsibilities must find a system for execution.

Hence, the single most effective thing you could do is, to break your one big multi-agenda sales meeting into 3 smaller segments with a specific purpose. We discussed on a separate blog post how a General Sales Meeting can be divided into a “Pipeline Update” meeting, a “Forecast Accuracy” meeting and “Learning & Sharing” session.

On top of that, do not shy away from 1-on-1 coaching sessions that every sales rep deserves. If you are a small sales team or an tech-founder-driven sales team, you would find this the single most productive way to steer your ‘sales’ ship, especially if your hirees are in-experienced. On the other hand, if you are a sales manager with a larger share of responsibility, and 8 to 10 reps, this would be the most effective way to drive a sales cultural cohesion.

Finally, the difference between Monday morning sales stand-ups in the 90s and the way meetings are run today is greatly shaped by the way sales teams are organised. The sales teams today are globally dispersed, serving customers in various time zones from one region. On one hand, they are extremely mobile and hot-desking kind and on the other – they are selling only over the phone (i.e. inside sales).

While the flexibility and agility that comes with modern-day sales teams is beneficial for the organisation, sales leaders with a shorter ‘window of contact’ with their reps often find themselves on their toes for driving the sales effectiveness and management. But the modern toolkit that aid sales managers has fortunately evolved with the times.

Ok, so how do you know if not having an enabling toolset is the missing link?

1. Your team does not have your CRM open in any of your sales meetings! That’s the big one. If you’re discussing deals, pipeline and forecast subjectively without looking at the data in real-time, you are set for a non-responsive management.
2. You cannot recall your top 5 closing opportunities, top 5 lagging opportunities, reasons for biggest deals risking closure in terms of next steps. When I say recall, I mean within 15 seconds of asking this question (and without asking the reps).
3. Your reps ‘resolve’ to update their CRM after the meeting but not right away.
4. Your sales enablement plan is non-existent, and as good as ‘shadow my best rep’
5. Or it is a combination of word documents, pdfs, presentations and links all over the place.
6. Your sales trainings follow an open agenda, without tracking progress after skills-lessons are shared.

How do you turn this around? – You may ask.

The shift in sales management to excellence starts with trust-based reliance on the core sales tool for managers, the CRM. The control you have on your sales management depends on how well is your sales process integrated on CRM and second, how accurately it is represented using reporting & dashboarding capability.Well, that’s just the start. The CRM is a go-to-place for all active sales discussions with your team, not just notebooks or whiteboards. Driving a strong culture of the CRM-led management relies heavily on the biggest beneficiary of this core tool – the sales leader or even the CEO.

In my experience of working with 100s of companies, I’ve found a few golden rules that stick out and make an effective sales management the second nature. In fact, it all crystallized when I worked with a detail-oriented CEO who took his 150 sales army from no CRM to 100% adoption on Salesforce.com. He shares those golden rules of team management on CRM here.

Besides CRM, the sales enablement and coaching plan is best supported by tools that make it hundred times more effective and efficient. Sales enablement is a wide range of things and there are tools that address each specific challenge within this topic. And which one is for you is a discussion that I’m happy to have.

If you are interested on how to develop a scalable sales process, you would likely enjoy one of our recent e-books about Sales Acceleration.

Recently we’ve had a session with Val Gray from Talent Makers about sales hiring. And more importantly how to eliminate the gut feeling that hiring decisions are often based on.

I’m sure all sales managers who build their teams from scratch, let it be a startup or a well-established company, face this problem. How do you evaluate someone’s capabilities of doing one task or another? Without a trial and error, it’s quite challenging.

And if you’re a B2B startup in a smaller niche with a finite amount of customers this could be a vital choice in your startup.

What would you do in that case?

Would you spend more and get a big sales superstar who closes deals that are equal to your annual revenue? But how do you know if that person will be capable of closing smaller deals? That is often an issue when going big in that department.

But frankly, there is no way to be certain about that choice. You can’t predict the future.

But what you can do is to establish a hiring process in a way that you could estimate how the future employee would perform. Obviously, it’s not 100% accurate, but at least it’s not completely going blindly into the forest.

I could tell you more, but I’m sure you will find the webinar more useful. It’s openly available for everyone to see on Youtube.

[video_lightbox_youtube video_id=”3JWRHODeYtA” width=”1280″ height=”720″ anchor=”https://saleschakra.com/en/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/webinar-with-val.png”]

I highly suggest subscribing to our newsletter to avoid missing any of B2B SaaS sales talks, collaborations and webinars. We always announce them prior an upcoming event or send the recording through ours newsletter.

Another toolkit post!

This idea came to me after an awesome blog post by Vanhishikha last week! If you haven’t checked it yet – do it! She talks about Inbound Marketing and why it’s so helpful in a SaaS company. I think it could be beneficial to any company! Who doesn’t like customers coming to them?

But, if you read this blog you already know that I just love to recommend stuff. The one I used and the one that still works to this day. Some items in this list are absolute must-haves. So, in this post, I will try to suggest a set of tools to get your Inbound Marketing started the right way. Some of these tools are what we currently run in SalesChakra, so based on my hands-on experience I’ll tell you what I think of them.

1. Webpage

The backbone of your Inbound Marketing success. SalesChakra currently runs on WordPress CMS. If you already have a domain and hosting for your website you also can download their CMS from WordPress.Org. Install it on your server with their Famous 5-Minute Installation and begin taking advantages of the most used website building platform in the world. There’s also WordPress.Com that lets you create a personalized website with their free theme. They offer a free domain that has yourwebsitename.wordpress.com or you can buy a domain (yourwebsitename.com, .net, .me etc) there. For web hosting, they have 3 plans including a free. However, if you have just a little HTML knowledge, there are many simpler tools to choose from! I have found a helpful article that summarized 3 biggest platforms for building a website, if you don’t know coding that well. From my experience of working with Wix.com, I can assure you that it’s so simple to use that literally anyone can launch and maintain a website.

2. Landing Page

For landing pages, it’s the best idea to create them within website’s theme or CMS, but in case it’s too difficult – I recommend WishPond. It’s so simple to use and allows you to create beautiful and engaging landing pages. You can further host them on your domain and make it look like they were made within your CMS. What’s more to it for you, as analytics oriented marketer – it allows A/B testing of landing pages to find the ones that work best with your audience. To be honest, you can do it manually too, but I think this implementation saves time & really makes you the smart one in the room when you come up with WishPond’s in-depth reports.

3. Emails

We used to send emails with Mautic, but now we moved to MailChimp for newsletters. It makes life easier with their template features, email lists and more thorough analytics. Mautic still works well for tracking emails or sending personalized emails. But overall we use Mautic to send personalized emails and for mass emailing – MailChimp does it. Either way, building a list is just a part of the process. Working that list and connecting with people and making the emails you send worthwhile is where it’s at.

4. Social Media

We’re using Hootsuite, but depending on your size – the Buffer might suit your social media needs too. However, Hootsuite is excellent – from scheduling to several social sites at once to creating a scheduling calendar & tracking ALL posts sent. It also allows you to create various streams and for example, track your competitors’ activity on Twitter. Buffer, on the other hand, provides the best times to publish and other similar functions found in Hootsuite. I think, this one is up to you to decide which scheduling platform you like the best as they all work fine.

5. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Very first step to kick-start your SEO would be to create an account on Google Webmasters Tools. Once you add your website there it shows where the errors could be found on your website and gives tips on how to solve them. Having faults on your website decreases your rating and scores you lower on the search results. Also, I’d like to recommend the most accurate database for tracking backlinks that I know – Ahrefs. Their metrics are accurate and they bring results.

In my opinion, SEO is one of the most important factor in Inbound Marketing and making your content SEO friendly could be incredibly beneficial because it’s an absolutely free traffic. You don’t have to schedule anything nor pay for it. It only takes some effort to maintain decent score by solving most common mistakes and keep yourself on track if you’re not hacked and none of the pages on your domain consist of malware. Finally, if you’re offering quality content – making it easy to find on Google or other search engine will benefit you in a long run.

6. Analytics

The most important part in your Inbound Marketing is tracking tools. All of the tools mentioned above offer analytics and it will be up to you to join them all together.

All except one – your website!

You should setup Google Analytics as soon as you launch your website. To know who is coming to see what you’re writing about. However, functionality doesn’t end there. Using UTM tool, you can create different campaigns and track clicks from various sources. I can’t stress how important it is to see where the people are coming from and how each channel can be compared. Even if you’re not too friendly with Analytics, it’s handy skill to have as you can make adjustments to optimize your marketing budget.

I think, I’ve covered all the major Inbound Marketing steps with the tools mentioned. Just setting all of them up and making everything work like a well oiled machine is quite a major task. Maybe I missed something? Maybe you have some suggestions? Feel free to discuss in the comments.

Last week we had an opportunity to hold a cozy AMA session with several startups and their sales leaders. The main topic was related to startups who are selling HR solutions to businesses. Either bigger enterprises or smaller SMBs. However, I’ve decided to create a timestamp post for questions to Pradeep, so it would be easier to find what you’re looking for.

The main guest speaker was Pradeep Agarwal – he shared his experience that he gained during an initial Google for Work kickstart and Salesforce entry in India. Currently, he is a COO & VP Sales in an HR software solution startup – hSenid. It’s certain that Pradeep built a vast skillset in startup sales over the years and now he shares all that knowledge with you.

In this session, he answered questions by these companies’ sales leaders: Perdoo, Strat-Board and OurHealthMate. The recording is freely available on SalesChakra Youtube channel:

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The very first question was a pretty general one – How to co-sell an expensive solution when the final decision is based on multi-party choice: HR team loves it, but operation team – satisfied with the current solution? It’s a pretty common problem that most B2B sales guys face. Answer.

Another question was how to qualify opportunity based on P-BANT criteria? Pradeep & Deep shared their opinions about BANT identification and other alternatives better suited for B2B SaaS solutions. Answer.

The third question was asked by Perdoo team and they wanted to know on how do to scale the revenue from 10K MRR to 100K MRR over 1 year? This is a broad and in-depth question that Pradeep answered and you can check it yourself in the recording. He also shared his tips on how to scale it and how he experienced a similar problem with the Salesforce market penetration in India. Answer.

Another question was How do you challenge the status quo when the HR team is perfectly happy with the current solution? It’s also quite a general one and the tactics explained by Pradeep could be used widely, not only in an HR sector. Also, Deep shared why you might need to wait a bit or target a company at the perfect time when the trigger event happens. Answer.

During the session, Greg from Perdoo asked how to compensate sales reps and new account executives? And the plan differs all the time, but I think Pradeep explained it perfectly and Deep elaborated with a methodology recommended by him. Answer.

Final questions were by Sapan and how to create an effective online demo process? And especially delve deeper into a more automated process and remain a scalable process. Especially when having success during offline demo, but not online. Answer.

And a very last question during the session: How do I ask my team better questions to advance opportunities? Pradeep shared his recent article to help answer this question and describe the model that he uses. Answer.

Anyway, I hope you found this session valuable. We’ll be certainly having more of such sessions in the future and a sure way not to miss any would be to subscribe to our newsletter – we send it once a month – SalesChakra’s news & upcoming events combined.